Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Looks like our good friend Beret Dude (maybe I should call him Mr. Beret) is back, and he once again makes no sense as a character! Last time, I was confused because he had gone from kind of off-beat and meaningful (much like early xkcd as a whole) to obsessed with bakeries and then oddly quiet. Is there a pattern here that makes him a consistent character in anyway? Hardly seems like it, and in the unlikely event that there is some continuity here it's almost certainly obliterated with today's comic.

Seriously, what's going on here? Mr. Beret is, we now discover, a total idiot, and he apparently thinks his fat mom is outside the known universe pulling him or something. I mean I guess the joke is he is very stupid, to the point that he takes the other guy's joke seriously, but that doesn't strike me as all that funny. Anyone have a better sense of it?

As far as I can tell, we have at long last another addition to the "ha ha, bitches, I'm getting all serious on you WITH NO WARNING" series. What I would have liked to see was the comic appear to take a turn for the Serious and Meaningful in the last panel, but then after "pull harder, mom" the dude from the first two panels yells, off-screen, "That's what SHE said!" thus destroying the meaningfulness and messing with the readers in a far more amusing way.

Anyway, what the fuck is up with the Beret guy? He really has nothing to do with any of his other appearances, ever. That's not how characters work, at least not this soon after they've been introduced. It just makes no sense.

I also see that the seated character manages to lose his legs in between the first and second panels. How 'bout that.

Update: Reading over the comments, you can see that a lot of people who usually think the way I do disagree with me on this one and like this comic. This may very well be one of those situations where my inherent anti-xkcd bias is not something I can overcome, and so I will simply point out that I am aware of it and let it be what it is. Come to your own conclusions, folks!

----------If you did not come upon it on your own in your daily webcomic perusal, note that Overcompensating made a joke on this same topic on the same day. Amazing! But Jeffery Rowland has some proof that he at least came up with the idea before he saw this. Just an odd story, and in any case, you should read Overcompensating if you aren't already.

I dunno, I kind of liked this one. I mean, it's sort of a thing with Randall to "take an unfunny joke completely literally, thereby making it a little more funny/poignant", which is what he's doing here. I think the timing is pretty good, too.

Anon - I'm pretty sure he did. I mean, the non-beret'd man suggests that his mom is out there pulling everything towards her, and then he contemplates that in panel 3, and then he hopes his mom will pull them all faster so he can see her again. If he isn't taking "your mom" seriously, then what the hell is he doing, and why is it funny?

Sarah - I think Randall does poignancy well on occasion, but not nearly as often as he thinks he does. This one doesn't work for me just because it's hard to imagine Mr. Beret (i have got to start being consistent with his name) being so stupid that he takes it seriously. Especially after the "zing." And given his somewhat psychotic stapling frenzy and lugnut eating, it's also hard for me feel any empathy for the guy. Like when Mr. Hat was depressed.

Mr. Beret's mother is dead. He is contemplating the possibility of the afterlife, that, even after death, there may still be a chance for him to see her again. I.E. - "Your mom." "Oh God, is it possible that even beyond death the entity of my mother might still exist somewhere beyond this universe?!"

I felt this comic was an attempt at sentimentality that just comes off as morbid and sad.

Weird, people I usually agree with seem to all like this one...makes me feel awkward. Anyway, I agree with poore, and I'll add that given the other contexts in which we see Mr. Beret it's also a little schizophrenic.

I think with this review you alienated a few people who sympathize with your cause but still also like the comic sometimes. This one was a good strip if you took the time to think about it without a negative bias to the entire webcomic.

In my opinion this post seemed just slightly more of an attack on the comic than a well thought out critique that I've seen from you in your past posts. Keep up the good work over all though.

I think you are taking Beret Man a little too seriously. Randall probably just likes drawing berets and probably doesn't really expect someone to catalog all of the character's appearances, despite how nerdy they are.

For the most part, it's not even a continuous strip. You can jump in anywhere and not be lost.

I doubt it. Mr. Hat is clearly a recurring character, and there are at least a few comics where Mr. Beret has some continuity (the bakery stuff, I guess, is the only one, but still) and making different characters look identical is just horribly and needlessly confusing. At the least he should give them different colored hats, or some other distinctive characteristic.

So little visual distinction between characters is going to make it hard for him to do more long form stuff, as he's trying to do.

Well, Beret guy used to be the Existentialist. It's not just bakeries you know.

I didn't mind this one, either. Although that might just be because it was so much better than the three or so previous XKCDs, and indeed better than the day's Overcompensating, which usually trounces XKCD in terms of chuckleworthiness.

(That's not to diminish OC, though - in fact, the next comic is quite relevant to this place, especially the third panel:

in your faq you claim to "get" these jokes. well YOU"RE A FUCKING RETARD FOR SAYING SO!!! The joke isn't that Beret Guy's an idiot, it's that Beret Guy's lost his mother, and is so sad he would delusion himself to believe that his mother may still be out there, thus making the clearly unaware other guy's immature yo mama joke an insensitive jab at the scarred person's emotions. The same thing happened at my school once.

If the joke is "he is sad" then that is just evil. "HIS MOM DIED, LET'S LAUGH AT HIM." Maybe that would fly on Cyanide and Happiness but not here. Randall just isn't that bad a guy. The joke is that he is so dumb he thinks the guy is not making fun of him.

Personally, I liken it to The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. Hopefully, you've read it (in my school, I even had to memorize it). If not, go do that now.

In a way, this is extremely similar. The narrator in The Raven is not extremely dumb, is he? He can at least "[ponder] over a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore." He is not exactly insane, either; he obviously knows that the raven’s answers have no meaning: "what it utters is its only stock and store." Nevertheless, he continues to ask it questions regarding the afterlife despite knowing that its answers are meaningless.

In that case, the narrator is not exactly insane, but so jarred at Lenore's death that he somewhat tries to delude himself into believing the raven. He even gets angry at the raven after it constantly spouts out "nevermore" even though he previously realizes that it says the same thing anyway.

It is essentially the same thing here. The beret guy is so extremely saddened by the death of his mother that he sort of mentally deludes himself into believing that the other guy's answer actually has some value to it. He is not exactly dumb or insane, but just so extremely distressed that he is willing to latch onto any hope handed out, in this case that the other guy really does mean his mom is pulling the galaxies, and in The Raven that the bird really does know the truth about Heaven.

Perhaps this comic is not meant to be a joke. It uses humor, I will not argue that, but it does so for the greater message. The joke is not that the guy is dumb or “HIS MOM DIED, LET'S LAUGH AT HIM.” Like The Raven, although perhaps not as well expressed, he is merely making a point about how great an impact sadness can have on our minds.

perhaps. and perhaps this is one of those comics that is really not meant to be funny. But it seems like that excuse gets used a LOT - far more than it should be. But again, this may be a case where it's justified.

It's not meant to be "suddenly serious".Do you know that episode from "The IT Crowd" at Denholm's funeral? Denholm's son shows up in a very dramatic way, tries to hide his tears and screams "FATHARRR!!!" with a dramatic gesture.

This is kind of a joke like that, only more subtle. Yes, you laugh about a person who is sad, but you're not laughing about the REASON why he's sad, you're just laughing about his way of expressing it.

i lost my mom a long time ago when i was 13. if you still have your mom, the comic may seem stupid or morbid. the "intelligent" part of the comic is regarding the theory. the sad part, which is obvious, is sad. the hypothesis that a supermassive object is pulling everything to a central universal point is no more arbitrary or ridiculous than mr. beret's mom going to heaven to be with god. this is my favorite of all the xkcd comics. one theory is just as good as the next until it's disproved. cheers.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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